Dark Energy

A Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist has won the 2011 Einstein Medal for his discovery of a mysterious force dubbed "dark energy" that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Adam Riess, 41, will share the prize with Saul Perlmutter, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose team published similar results just after Riess' team. The prize has been awarded since 1979 by the Albert Einstein Society, in Bern, Switzerland, recognizing outstanding scientific work linked to Einstein's.

More than anything else, in the wake of the elation and tumult accompanying Tuesday's announcement that he'd won a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess wants to get back to work. "I really want to keep doing the research I do, and not just supervise people doing research," a fate that sometimes befalls Nobel laureates, he said. His discovery of dark energy, and the accelerating expansion of the universe was, after all, something he accomplished in 1998 at the University of California Berkeley - at the age of 28. Since then, he has moved to Hopkins and used powerful instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope to push even farther toward the edge of the visible universe, and toward unraveling the mystery of dark energy.

Astronomers wielding the Hubble Space Telescope say they've pushed back the curtain a bit on a mystery so bizarre it caused even Albert Einstein to doubt himself. Using Hubble to examine the light from 24 exploding stars as far as 9 billion light-years away, astrophysicists in Baltimore concluded that "dark energy," the unexplained force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, has been around - apparently unchanged - for at least 9 billion years. Nobody knows what dark energy is or how it works.

The Baltimore astrophysicist credited with discovering "dark energy," the mysterious force believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, says he has used the Hubble Space Telescope to disprove a competing explanation for the phenomenon. Adam Riess, of the Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute, says his team, using Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3, was able to look at more stars, in both visible and infrared wavelengths. That eliminated errors introduced in previous work, which compared measurements from Hubble and other telescopes.

The picture on Adam Riess' computer monitor arrived fresh from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. It was the fading light from an exploding star, potentially a key piece of evidence in his yearslong investigation of one of the greatest of all cosmological mysteries - dark energy. But as the Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist waited for the next image to arrive, an e-mail message popped onto his screen. In an instant, he tumbled into what he describes as one of those "uh-oh" moments when everything changes.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they have glimpsed the ultimate fate of the universe. In what some are calling a landmark study, a team led by Adam Riess and Louis-Gregory Strolger said yesterday they have found the most reliable measure yet of the mysterious "dark energy" that's pushing everything in the universe apart. Captured from the light of exploding stars, the data suggest that dark energy is pushing at a nearly constant rate, just as Albert Einstein predicted in 1920.

CLEVELAND - Astronomers said yesterday that they had determined the time in cosmic history when a mysterious force, "dark energy," began to wrench the universe apart. Some 5 billion years ago, said Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the universe experienced a "cosmic jerk." Before then, he said, the combined gravity of the galaxies and everything else in the cosmos was resisting the cosmic expansion, slowing it down. Since the jerk, though, the universe has been speeding up. The results were based on observations by a multinational team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to search out exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae, reaching back in time three-quarters of the way to the big bang in which the universe was born.

Astronomers are a big-picture bunch. They want to know how galaxies form, how planets behave and what the light from distant stars tells us about the dawn of time. But the group that gathered in Washington last week waded into an issue that's really big, even by cosmological standards. They're trying to measure dark energy -- the unseen but very real force that's causing the universe to expand. "I believe this is the biggest mystery in all of science," said Michael Turner, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who joined hundreds of colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

It might seem as if astronomers and astrophysicists have had enormous success at unlocking the mysteries of space. Impressive evidence has been gathered to support the theory that our universe was created about 13.7 billion years ago with an explosion of energy that eventually formed the innumerable galaxies still spinning away from one another to uncharted expanses of space. We've discovered distant planets that might be friendly to life as we know it and have estimated distances to remote pulsing stars to help map the universe.

How quickly is the universe expanding? A group led by an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University plans to design a telescope to answer that question. Charles L. Bennett's team will spend a $1.5 million federal grant during the next two years designing an infrared space telescope capable of conducting the largest survey yet of the universe. The Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope would measure light from distant galaxies as a way to study dark energy - the mysterious force that is pushing galaxies away from each other and speeding up the expansion of the universe.

A Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist has won the 2011 Einstein Medal for his discovery of a mysterious force dubbed "dark energy" that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Adam Riess, 41, will share the prize with Saul Perlmutter, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose team published similar results just after Riess' team. The prize has been awarded since 1979 by the Albert Einstein Society, in Bern, Switzerland, recognizing outstanding scientific work linked to Einstein's.

A Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist whose work helped determine the precise age and composition of the universe will share the $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy for 2010, the school announced Thursday. Charles Bennett and two colleagues at Princeton University are being honored for their groundbreaking work with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a spacecraft launched in 2001 to study cosmic background radiation, said to be a remnant of the "big bang" that scientists say marked the birth of the universe.

The picture on Adam Riess' computer monitor arrived fresh from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. It was the fading light from an exploding star, potentially a key piece of evidence in his yearslong investigation of one of the greatest of all cosmological mysteries - dark energy. But as the Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist waited for the next image to arrive, an e-mail message popped onto his screen. In an instant, he tumbled into what he describes as one of those "uh-oh" moments when everything changes.

It might seem as if astronomers and astrophysicists have had enormous success at unlocking the mysteries of space. Impressive evidence has been gathered to support the theory that our universe was created about 13.7 billion years ago with an explosion of energy that eventually formed the innumerable galaxies still spinning away from one another to uncharted expanses of space. We've discovered distant planets that might be friendly to life as we know it and have estimated distances to remote pulsing stars to help map the universe.

At a recent National Association of Science Writers Conference in Baltimore, the "Lunch with a Scientist" session offered a menu of informal talks on a wide range of topics. Though my employer pays me to know and write about the retina - the thin piece of vision-critical tissue in the back of the eye - I decided to be a little derelict in my duties and learn about something completely new and unrelated. I considered sitting at the table where "Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Lessons from an Amoeba" was being presented, but I figured that might lead to flashbacks of former girlfriends and images of pond scum - two topics that don't exactly arouse my appetite.

Astronomers wielding the Hubble Space Telescope say they've pushed back the curtain a bit on a mystery so bizarre it caused even Albert Einstein to doubt himself. Using Hubble to examine the light from 24 exploding stars as far as 9 billion light-years away, astrophysicists in Baltimore concluded that "dark energy," the unexplained force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, has been around - apparently unchanged - for at least 9 billion years. Nobody knows what dark energy is or how it works.

A photograph of a distant exploding star has given astronomers the first direct evidence that a mysterious "negative gravity" force swept through and still pervades the universe, according to NASA scientists. The exploding star, the most distant ever observed, was photographed by luck in 1997. But scientists say subsequent detective work involving the relative intensity of its light confirms one of Einstein's conjectures about the universe: that all of space is now bubbling with an invisible form of energy that creates a mutual repulsion between objects normally attracted to each other by gravity.

A Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist whose work helped determine the precise age and composition of the universe will share the $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy for 2010, the school announced Thursday. Charles Bennett and two colleagues at Princeton University are being honored for their groundbreaking work with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a spacecraft launched in 2001 to study cosmic background radiation, said to be a remnant of the "big bang" that scientists say marked the birth of the universe.

How quickly is the universe expanding? A group led by an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University plans to design a telescope to answer that question. Charles L. Bennett's team will spend a $1.5 million federal grant during the next two years designing an infrared space telescope capable of conducting the largest survey yet of the universe. The Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope would measure light from distant galaxies as a way to study dark energy - the mysterious force that is pushing galaxies away from each other and speeding up the expansion of the universe.

Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars. Light from the big bang's afterglow shows that the universe grew from the size of a marble to an astronomical size in just a trillionth of a second after its birth 13.7 billion years ago, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Princeton universities say. Readings from a NASA probe also show that the earliest stars formed about 400 million years after the big bang - not 200 million years afterward, as the research team once thought.